Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: wil3ur on August 29, 2017, 03:23:16 PM
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Is there any posts or charts that show what the ballistic drop is on the different guns in game? I know you can do the .target and set it for different distances to gauge it visually in game. Just wondering if anyone has taken the data and setup a chart for this?
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Please......don't ask for charts.........you will wake up the gastropod..... :old:
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Don't wake slimy!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Yes, wake him up, it sounds interesting!
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You can go online to google and look up the guns . It will tell all about them. You can make a list of the ballistics. Hope this helps.
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Tony Williams has a wealth of information on them.
Your main request is too broad and vague. Generally speaking, Aces High models the correct weight and velocity of rounds large and small based on the weapons in question.
There are a couple of compromises, such as belting is averaged out on mixed-belt rounds, and such as prop sync doesn't degrade rate of fire as much as it should on some specific guns, but otherwise the round per round ballistics are quite good, even taking into account the air density if fired at 1k or 30k.
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I started a project where I used fighter spawns to set all of the fighters in the game, and some bombers, on the edge of slopes surrounding a small airfield so I could use 6 of 8 spawns. Ended up with three small islands and three airfields with 18 spawns to cover 95% of all the rides. Turns out it is a large scale bite in the whatsis to adjust the terrain to have a fighter spawn on it and not break its back while resting with the center line level. So surrounding these feilds are pits that run off into the ocean.
The rational for this is the center of the .Target is aligned with the center line Hitech assigned to each aircraft regardless of pitch. So I end up pulling the target all the way in to let prop HUBS or obvious center lines show me how much I have to raise or lower the pitch of the ground under the spawn.
Once this is accomplished, I spawn out the plane, pull up the target at say 400 and look at the relationship of the center line\target center to the center of the gunsight and the impact point on the target. I'm a few planes short of being finished and I'm fully involved with my new Melee arena terrain I've been documenting in the Terrain Editor forum. Besides, setting a plane on a static stand to bore sight like this does not show where the IP point will be relative to the gunsight influenced by your speed, turn rate and nose pitch during combat. Only combat experience does. A better thing to see can be done by sitting on the runway and pulling up the target while adding positive pitch to put the target up into your gunsight. Then at 200-600 look at what your impact spread will be. Also, this setup will not show you how much gunsight elevation you have to use flying a level 6 chase to land rounds in your con .25sec after you pull the trigger at 400yds. Only in game experience teaches that.
Here is a P51D on a static stand. All this verifies is the bullets are impacting relative to the center of my gunsight at 400yds, the rest is eyecandy. And way more work than it's worth, or Hitech would have coded a hard stand into the convergence app to let us test exactly this. And I don't like using the thing now that I created it because it shows you can tilt the motor mounted cannons in fighters up through the engine which is impossible outside of this game. In real life they were bolted in place to the engine firing straight out of the HUB.
You can also pull up terrains offline and look for slope drop offs at the ends of runways, then inch your ride just over the slope. You use the target in F3 mode to inch the center line into position. That's what I did for a number of years with the TA terrain offline.
(https://s20.postimg.org/y6td9wydp/sight01.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/jspzi6cjx/sight02.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/ltgj308p9/sight03.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/xjugke1hp/sight04.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/dqicroo3x/sight05.jpg)
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I remember the Air Warrior book used to have so much information, someone should put together a similar Aces High book.
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I remember the Air Warrior book used to have so much information, someone should put together a similar Aces High book.
Why can't you do it? All of the manuals and data is open source out on the internet. Why don't you try using the terrain editor and duplicate my hard stand bore sighting setup....
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I started a project where I used fighter spawns to set all of the fighters in the game, and some bombers, on the edge of slopes surrounding a small airfield so I could use 6 of 8 spawns. Ended up with three small islands and three airfields with 18 spawns to cover 95% of all the rides. Turns out it is a large scale bite in the whatsis to adjust the terrain to have a fighter spawn on it and not break its back while resting with the center line level. So surrounding these feilds are pits that run off into the ocean.
The rational for this is the center of the .Target is aligned with the center line Hitech assigned to each aircraft regardless of pitch. So I end up pulling the target all the way in to let prop HUBS or obvious center lines show me how much I have to raise or lower the pitch of the ground under the spawn.
Once this is accomplished, I spawn out the plane, pull up the target at say 400 and look at the relationship of the center line\target center to the center of the gunsight and the impact point on the target. I'm a few planes short of being finished and I'm fully involved with my new Melee arena terrain I've been documenting in the Terrain Editor forum. Besides, setting a plane on a static stand to bore sight like this does not show where the IP point will be relative to the gunsight influenced by your speed, turn rate and nose pitch during combat. Only combat experience does. A better thing to see can be done by sitting on the runway and pulling up the target while adding positive pitch to put the target up into your gunsight. Then at 200-600 look at what your impact spread will be. Also, this setup will not show you how much gunsight elevation you have to use flying a level 6 chase to land rounds in your con .25sec after you pull the trigger at 400yds. Only in game experience teaches that.
Here is a P51D on a static stand. All this verifies is the bullets are impacting relative to the center of my gunsight at 400yds, the rest is eyecandy. And way more work than it's worth, or Hitech would have coded a hard stand into the convergence app to let us test exactly this. And I don't like using the thing now that I created it because it shows you can tilt the motor mounted cannons in fighters up through the engine which is impossible outside of this game. In real life they were bolted in place to the engine firing straight out of the HUB.
You can also pull up terrains offline and look for slope drop offs at the ends of runways, then inch your ride just over the slope. You use the target in F3 mode to inch the center line into position. That's what I did for a number of years with the TA terrain offline.
(https://s20.postimg.org/y6td9wydp/sight01.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/jspzi6cjx/sight02.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/ltgj308p9/sight03.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/xjugke1hp/sight04.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/dqicroo3x/sight05.jpg)
Ouch, quite a bit of work on that one, which is why I was hoping HiTech might have just a quick "30cal german MG's are coded with 1" of drop for every 100 yards" or something similar. :P
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It's swell to have a spreadsheet and all, but given the fluidity of aerial gunnery, does it really do it that much good? Your airspeed affects the apparent trajectory of your bullets, your moving target is gaining/losing separation from you most of the time, your G load affects your aim point, alt plays a factor.
Just seems to me like a ton of work for not much applicable information, where looking up the real world info is likely to be close enough given all the other variables in play.
Wiley.
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Why can't you do it? All of the manuals and data is open source out on the internet. Why don't you try using the terrain editor and duplicate my hard stand bore sighting setup....
If all the similar data is available I'd be glad to work on it. I've never used the terrain editor, is there good information in there other than creating terrains?
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Contact Easyscor and he will get you going.
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Like Wiley said, you don't have to do all that work. It doesn't really tell you anything that the .target doesn't tell you already.
As for hub guns: They could be harmonized to a certain extent. They also weren't fixed to the centerline. When a plane flies its "forward" view is static and it can pitch up or down while maintaining level altitude based on its flight speed and/or weight. Rather, the gunsight and the guns are matched together and you fly the plane so that the gunsight (and thus the guns) is over a target. Then you shoot. Sitting a plane on a static stand does nothing to change this, and most planes that were on static stands also have moving targets fixed in front of them. It wasn't for scientific means, it was so they could see where bullets landed instead of "up into the air."
HTC also models in the scattering effect of vibrations on the guns themselves. You'll notice wing-mounted guns sometimes have a bit more spread because 6 guns vibrating next to each other can shake a lot and a tiny fraction of a degree means a bullet could be off by 1 mil (or whatever example). Nose mounted or more rigid guns tend to have tighter clusters, and bullets that fly faster and have tighter groupings anyways also have slightly less scatter because they hit the target before they can deviate all that much.
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It's swell to have a spreadsheet and all, but given the fluidity of aerial gunnery, does it really do it that much good? Your airspeed affects the apparent trajectory of your bullets, your moving target is gaining/losing separation from you most of the time, your G load affects your aim point, alt plays a factor.
Just seems to me like a ton of work for not much applicable information, where looking up the real world info is likely to be close enough given all the other variables in play.
Wiley.
Gunnery training in the real world taught you that your guns would be harmonized to the maximum effective distance you can expect to hit a moving con. You fired inside of that as a rule. Fighters 300-400 and bombers 600-1000. Then you had to learn deflection shooting and the 100mph principle. Only your armorer needed to know what your bore sight picture looked like at the effective range. You trusted that the rounds would pass through that point when you pointed the reticle and pulled the trigger at a con. After that you had to practice the skill of areal shooting. Most fighter pilots sucked at it and why the holy grail of gunsights were gyro compensating lead sights.
There is a reason the standard fighter reticle was some variation of the 100mph ring. Or a 100-140Mil ring depending on the guns being used. Those default gunsights are not in your rides just to clutter your view. And Hitech's physics models the 100mph principle.
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https://www.hornady.com/team-hornady/ballistic-calculators/ballistic-resources/external-ballistics
go to this site, enjoy.
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Only slight issue all kinds of numbers on the internet, but I've never been able to find the ballistic coefficient on a cannon round.
Wiley.
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Only slight issue all kinds of numbers on the internet, but I've never been able to find the ballistic coefficient on a cannon round.
Wiley.
Smooth bore? go here: http://arc.id.au/CannonBallistics.html
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No I mean something like an MK 108 or MK 103 or Hispano.
Wiley.
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Tony Williams at combatsim.com.
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Somebody asked me about ballistic coefficients so I though some of you might be interested in the answer.
There are two aspects to "ballistic coefficient". One is the sectional density ratio, the other is a form factor.
The sectional density ratio is a straightforward calculation which compares the projectile weight with the calibre. The formula basically divides the weight by the square of the calibre (there is another multiplier in there which varies depending on the units of measurement being used, to get all SDRs back to a comparable figure). Projectiles of different calibres but with the same SDR will lose velocity at the same rate (and will therefore follow the same trajectories if fired at the same muzzle velocity) provided
that they are aerodynamically comparable.
This brings in the form factor. Clearly, a streamlined bullet has less air resistance than a flat-nosed cylinder, so the SDR is modified by a "form factor" to take account of this. The end result is the ballistic coefficient (BC), which gives an accurate comparator of the rate at which different projectiles are slowed by wind resistance. It is not a simple matter to calculate an exact ballistic coefficient, because the form factor will vary with quite minor changes in projectile shape, but reasonable estimates can be made.
Incidentally, an outcome of these calculations is that for projectiles of exactly the same shape and proportions, the ballistic coefficient improves with increasing calibre in recognition of the fact that (other things being equal) big bullets travel further than little ones.
I'll give some examples from WW2 aircraft guns.
A typical 7.92mm bullet weighed 10g and had an SDR of 0.227
The .50 M2 bullet weighed 46g giving an SDR of 0.406
The 20mm M-Geschoss weighed 92g giving an SDR of 0.327
The 20mm Hispano weighed 130g giving an SDR of 0.462
The standard 30mm M-Geschoss weighed 330g with an SDR of 0.522
The 30mm Hartkern AP round weighed 355g with an SDR of 0.561
Obviously, the higher the figure the better.
Now we come to the tricky bit; the form factor. The only relevant
information I have relates to rifle and pistol bullets, but cannon
projectiles can be guesstimated from their shape. A blunt, round-nose
bullet has a form factor of 1.75, a pointed one around 1.0, a spitzer 0.8 and a match bullet (as streamlined as possible) 0.6. These factors are divided into the SDR to give the BC. The 7.92mm and .50 bullets were well streamlined, let's say 0.75. The cannon shells were blunt and cylindrical, so would be around 1.5. The Hartkern, though, was highly streamlined so would be around 0.75.
This gives the following approximate ballistic coefficients:
7.92 = .30
.50" = .54
20mm M-Geschoss = .22
20mm Hispano = .31
30mm M-Geschoss = .35
30mm Hartkern = .75
There is a direct relationship between BC and velocity loss. A bullet with a BC of .30 will lose 11% of its velocity (+/- 1%) over the first 100m, one of .15 will lose about 22%.
As you can see, their streamlined shape means that the MG bullets show up quite well against the blunt cannon shells despite their smaller calibre. The .50" in particular was a very good long-range gun.
Tony Williams
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Hmp! Thanks bustr.
Wiley.
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Everything I need to know about in-game ballistics can be succinctly summed up with three words:
pew, pew, pew
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Everything I need to know about in-game ballistics can be succinctly summed up with three words:
pew, pew, pew
rofl! :rofl
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The only thing researching and building all those gunsights did for me was force me to practice my gunnery all the time to know what I was talking about. So during those years I got good at pew, pew, pew in this game. Building two terrains has had me spend less time pew, pew, pew and it gets rusty.
If this request was in the hopes of gaining some insight to gunnery to help you pew, pew, pew. Placing yourself in situations more frequently to pew, pew, pew will do a lot more for your gunnery in the game. The Trainers can help fill in the gaps.
There is an AAF Gun Harmonizing manual from 1945 that has data tables for .50cal - 75mm. If you do a wide spread google search you can find other manuals for ammunition that will fill in the gaps. I have some of them, after I read them, it was apparent for this game that Zoney is dead on. Just go into the game and practice pew, pew pew.
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I'm a fairly decent shot... I was just hoping to find some information that is game related, because I'm sorry... but I don't believe the game takes into account all of the different things that a real life bullet does, even down to the change in ballistics between a tracer and non-tracer rounds.
The main point of wanting to know this is trying to find a sweet spot for convergence versus hitting power for different guns... Specifically German 20mm cannons and 7.62mgs.
To me they seem to have worse drop and velocity than either the 20mm hispano or the .303s.
No biggie, I was just hoping there was something quick and easy that someone had on hand as opposed to the tedious work of setting up a .target.
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Which german 20mm? The MG/FF you find on 109Es and 110Cs and 190A5s (the planes it shows up with 7mms) historically have terrible ballistics. You can "cheat" this by setting convergence out 100 yards more than you want so that they'll "lob" upwards a little more. Some do that with the 30mms also due to terrible drop.
Hispanos, on the other hand, are one of the fastest muzzle velocity cannons in the game and are amongst the best, so... yeah. The MG/FF don't compare at all. The MG151/20s are better by a lot, but still nowhere close. Then you get into other guns like the 20mm ShVak and so forth. All modeled with correct ballistics.
The rounds are averaged so that every individual round is the average of the overall belting. In reality, the difference between tracer and normal rounds was minimal. I think for AH purposes they disregarded the minimal weight shaving because the rounds were averaged out to normalize impact.
EDIT: For the sake of wing-mounted MG/FFs, don't shoot outside 300 yards. They can still hit and since they're a chemical explosive round they'll still do a lot of damage further out, but the aiming them reliably is key and they have very few rounds to miss with. Closer is better, but no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.
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I'm a fairly decent shot... I was just hoping to find some information that is game related, because I'm sorry... but I don't believe the game takes into account all of the different things that a real life bullet does, even down to the change in ballistics between a tracer and non-tracer rounds.
The main point of wanting to know this is trying to find a sweet spot for convergence versus hitting power for different guns... Specifically German 20mm cannons and 7.62mgs.
To me they seem to have worse drop and velocity than either the 20mm hispano or the .303s.
No biggie, I was just hoping there was something quick and easy that someone had on hand as opposed to the tedious work of setting up a .target.
You use the 100mph principle. Determine how long it takes an MGFF or MG151\20 to travel 300-400yds. Average your con's speed as 100mph. How far does your con travel at 100mph in the time it takes one of those 20mm to travel 300-400yds. That distance of travel by your con will be the Mil you lead by for a 100mph con using those rounds at 300-400yds. For every 100mph increase in speed, lead by another travel distance in Mil for 100mph.
For the allies this was based on the .50 and 20mm traveled 1200ft in about .48 seconds. Using the 100mph rule a con at 300mph at 1200ft away traveling 90 degrees would require a lead of 3 100Mil ring radii or 150Mil. At 1200ft traveling 100mph a con would cross 50Mil of a 100Mil ring reticle. This is why most pilots couldn't hit anything until the K14 did it all for them.
You can find a copy of Bordwaffenmunition on the internet as a free download. It will give you drops at range for the two cannon in meters. Then do a little math. You can search wiki for Mil math related to ballistics.
The MGFF drops about 8.5ft at .80sec to 400m, and the MG151 7ft. The MG151 takes .71sec to travel 400m, a lot slower than the .50 or 20mm hiso. The .50 and 20mm hiso drop about 40in at 1200ft. Lazor beams versus high explosive spud chukkers. You might say it's imperative to shoot german cannon at your convergence point to account for those long trajectory drops. That's what the german fixed gunnery manual taught fighter pilots.
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if you get in close drop doesn't happen..... shoot point blank
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The only thing that matters is what happens in game.
I use the target command for all guns..........but I also test them at different speeds and altitudes just to make sure I've taken everything in account.
I don't use the gunsight much at all in game.
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I don't use the gunsight much at all in game.
You use it, but not in the way the majority of players use it....
You have played the game long enough and practiced enough that you have developed a "mental hit picture" that has become like second nature to tell your muscle memory to "FIRE" or "pull the trigger", because the size of the enemy plane is at the same size of your "mental picture" that you've developed over time...
TC
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I don't use the gunsight much at all in game.
Well, ya used it awhile back when you roped me at 30k in your 110 when I was in a 262 and blew me away.
I'm waaaaaaaaaay butthurt about that still.
icepak is my friend :)
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Everything I need to know about in-game ballistics can be succinctly summed up with three words:
pew, pew, pew
:)
This is sig-worthy Zoney. Can I borrow it?
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Certainly <S>